Pen ‘n’ Coop: Describing itself as a “new food concept” of “Italian street food with an American twist,” it focuses on porchetta and rotisserie chicken sandwiches, with additional menus of salads, snacks, and sides. JM Bakery : Not listed on the Olly Olly website, no activity visible, though pots and pans hang in an adjacent bakery space. (We’ve italicized the stalls that aren’t open yet.) Here’s what we found shortly after opening week. and ate our way around the hall in a clockwise direction. at the moment - which is strange because much of the traffic to the region’s art galleries and the nearby High Line is on weekends. to 8 p.m, weekdays only for now, though most of the stalls don’t open till 11 a.m., and some close around 4 p.m. It offers more comfortable seating than elsewhere around the hall, reinforcing the idea that many food halls seem to be cocktail bars with a food court attached. In the usual urban food court style, much of the seating is at counters and standing tables, except for Bar Avant, occupying the largest space in the food court. From the east, it is many blocks from the subway and the signs in the window are easy to miss. The building is situated between 11th Avenue and the West Side Highway and is inaccessible from the West other than a narrow sidewalk. Occupying part of the ground floor of the Starrett-Lehigh Building, once the site of Martha Stewart’s empire, the space would be super desirable - except for its difficult-to-find location.

The name - silly but easy to remember - is half of a Victorian-era children’s chant (“Olly olly, oxen free”) shouted to bring players home after a game of hide and seek. For now, the food hall boasts a total of 11 food counters, including a handful not yet up and running. Remember the Deco, Berg’n, Todd English at the Plaza, and the Pennsy?Īs new food halls continue to arrive, competition has become more fierce with owners testing new formulae, such as the food hall mainly restricted to Singaporean fare called Urban Hawker earlier this fall, followed by Olly Olly Market in far west Chelsea which comes by way of a Chicago hospitality group.

By now we have so many that their success is not assured and the graveyard of innovative food courts is now crowded with tombstones. It was almost a decade ago that food halls began to dot the urban landscape, utilizing spare spaces to provide smaller and more affordable real estate to restaurateurs.

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